Above, I made the statement, "The dumbing down' comes from laziness, lack of interest, and desire to be entertained rather than informed." After thinking it over, I'm afraid I was a bit harsh.

When you consider the huge numbers of people who are working two jobs or working vast amounts of overtime just to keep ahead of the game, while at the same time trying to raise a family, they have neither the time nor the energy to sit around being philosopher kings. Tired and harried most of the time, if they read or watch the news at all, they have time only for headlines and sound-bites. This is grossly aggravated by the fact that what information they do get is slanted and often inaccurate. The fact that such a large percentage of the population believes that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 (I heard a woman in a "man-in-the-street interview" just yesterday say that she didn't like the fact that we went to war with Iraq, "but, after all, they attacked us first.") is an extraordinary indictment of the media.

On top of this, many people don't see the connection between politics and their own lives. A bunch of old, fat, white guys arguing incessantly about economics and foreign policy and other things they don't really understand much about, and besides that, they're all a bunch of crooks anyway, and there's nothing you can do about them. They write the whole thing off as not worth bothering with, failing to realize that what these old, fat white guys do can have a direct effect on their lives. This, in turn, is an indictment of our educational system, which has been in the Dumpster for some time now (a situation that will not be improved by Bush promising "no child left behind," while continuing to cut funding for education).

So there is some justification for the general public not being well informed. It doesn't excuse it, but it makes it easier to understand.

Don Firth